


Running in the Library

by sophinisba



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: 1000-5000 Words, Community: tindogs_fic, Episode Related, Gen, Rare Pairing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-09-01
Updated: 2008-09-01
Packaged: 2017-10-05 21:49:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,922
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/46365
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sophinisba/pseuds/sophinisba
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>At first it seemed to Jenny that trying to find the Library was a lot like trying to find the Doctor.  ("The Doctor's Daughter" in the setting of "Silence in the Library" and "Forest of the Dead".)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Running in the Library

**Author's Note:**

  * For [pie_is_good](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pie_is_good/gifts).



> Written for tindogs_fic, the Doctor Who Minor Characters Ficathon, 2008.

By the time Jenny witnessed her first data ghost she'd been travelling the universe for around six months and visited eighteen different planets, rescued thirteen civilizations, had torrid love affairs with members of four species and three genders, defeated countless strange creatures, done an awful lot of running and seen an awful lot of death.

She was generated for war, into war, and death itself didn't scare her. In this particular war she'd seen people shot to pieces in front of her eyes and her eyes had stayed open, her finger steady on the trigger. But when she had to talk to a remnant of a man cycling on a communication system it nearly undid her.

"Jenny, is that you?" the dead man asked.

"Don't worry," another soldier told her, "he's not suffering."

"Jenny, is that you? I'm so glad you've come back. I was afraid –"

"Nothing to be afraid of now," said Jenny, smiling at him, though she couldn't see his face through the battle armour. "Not for the moment, anyway."

"I was afraid I wouldn't see you again."

Jenny hadn't given much thought to whether she'd see him again. He was nice enough. What was his name again? Robin. Wish he wouldn't keep repeating himself like that.

"Jenny, is that you?"

"We need to get back to Headquarters," said Warren, the leader of the expedition, the one for whom Robin had just stepped in front of a bullet. When he noticed how much Jenny was trembling he sneered, "Oh, don't tell me you haven't seen this before. It's just a technical glitch, all right? An echo."

Jenny nodded. She wished the word _echo_ didn't echo in her mind the way it did, like the voice of a loved one who won't let you grieve, won't let you touch his heart. It sounded like rejection and lingering at the same time. She didn't feel sorry for Robin – once she understood, that was all right, he wasn't suffering anymore – but she couldn't help feeling sorry for herself.

And she didn't like feeling sorry for herself. She was a can-do kind of girl, after all.

"How do we bring him back?" she asked.

"Jenny, is that you? I'm so glad."

"Not much we can do," said Warren. "I don't know that any one of us has the heart to end it."

_End it_. It came to Jenny then to wonder whether the Doctor had felt the same instinct, the same terror and disgust, when he'd looked at her and seen a corruption of himself. Even Donna had said she wasn't real. And Jenny'd had no trouble arguing against them at the time, but as she got to know herself and the universe better she felt it more and more, that something was missing. And maybe it was the same with her as it was with the ghost of her friend in the machine. No way of bringing it back, no way to unite this echo with the real person who generated the pattern.

"I was afraid," said Robin's echo.

"Don't be," said Jenny. And she crossed the short distance between them and cut his armour open with a laser.

It was a relief to look at his face again and see its stillness. She pulled apart the mouthpiece and the wire that had caught and held the echo. She helped lay out the body and said a few words over it before they fired up the incinerator.

The experience made her loath to wear the armour after that – though, what with the enemy's superior firearms, she hated to go out without it either. She resolved to stop thinking about it until the fighting was done, and afterwards she asked Warren to explain the technical details.

Unfortunately the answer went completely over her head, but the confidence with which he spoke was somewhat reassuring. Since Warren seemed so sure of knowing everything that had happened or ever could happen anywhere in the universe, she also asked him if he'd ever heard of Time Lords.

"Heard of them, yes," he said, "but I never paid much attention. They're extinct, you see. Not much good studying something that doesn't exist."

"How can you be sure that there are none left?"

"There was a war."

"But couldn't one or two have escaped? And if there are two, if there's even one, the race can carry on, can't it?"

He moved some papers around on his desk, not looking at her, and said, "I don't have the information you're looking for."

"Who does?"

"I don't know of any person living who's bothered, but I suppose someone will have written it down."

"Ah." Jenny had been planning to leave this planet and find something more exciting, now that she'd managed to end the war. If she was going to stay, she didn't want to spend her time sitting around reading books. And yet, if she didn't know that history, what was she? Just a glitch in the system? "All right," she said, "could you lend me any books you have about them?"

"Oh, I don't have any of those books. I told you, I'm not interested in ancient history."

"Well, who _does_ have the books then?"

*

_A search of the files returns 7983 references to the Time Lords. References to the Doctor cannot be displayed because an initial search returns more than one million million occurrences. The name he shares with the world is as common as rivers and music, darkness and trees, and cannot be traced._

*

At first it seemed to Jenny that trying to find the Library was a lot like trying to find the Doctor. People always smiled and said, "But of course," and led her to some little room with computers, tables, and sometimes a few shelves full of books. Sometimes they had music, but it had to be listened to with headphones and there was no dancing, no singing. In fact, people were always telling Jenny to keep very quiet in the library (which she eventually came to understand was not the same thing as the Library, any more than the old man in the white lab coat who wanted to look up her nose was the same person as the Doctor).

Jenny didn't like being told to be quiet.

The prospect of visiting a planet occupied completely by a library appealed to her somewhat less than that of escaping from an army of giant slime-spitting frogs, so she did the latter first. Jenny rather adored hitchhiking. Everything in the universe was new and she thought most of it wonderful, even when it didn't feel the same way about _her_. She felt an urgent need to see and touch and smell and taste it all, everything that was new. But the need to learn about the past, the sum of knowledge and the shared history the Doctor had talked about – was always with her. And if the one man who could explain it to her had to go travelling through time and making himself unavailable, it seemed the Library was the best place to find out.

Once she'd made her way there, the Library turned out not to be boring in the least. Besides the high-speed monorail cars for travelling between sections, there were ladders for reaching the higher shelves, and Jenny was delighted to discover how easily they slid along the railings when you gave a good push. One never knew just where they'd stop and what would be there to read about when they did. Swinging on the ladders was how Jenny ran into Lee, who was standing on the balcony just above her when she came to a stop.

"Excuse me," she called up to him. "What are you reading about?"

He leaned over the balcony and his mouth moved, but Jenny didn't hear anything, and at first she thought it might be some trick of the library, some censure of her noise. Maybe sound wouldn't carry between levels and he couldn't hear her at all. Maybe nobody could.

"Sorry?" she asked, even louder this time.

"H – h – h – Hemingway," when the word finally came it came in a rush, and it meant nothing to Jenny, other than clarifying that there was no technological trick, just a stammer. She reached up to the floor of the level he was standing on and swung herself up over the railing. He shrank back from her in surprise, but when she smiled at him he smiled back.

"Where's that then?" she asked, moving closer to him and glancing at the book in his hands.

He opened it up to show her the table of contents. "It's f- fiction." He took a breath. "Short stories about – men who don't talk much."

Jenny thought about Governor Warren and the other men she'd known who talked far too much, and thought she could do with a change. Standing next to Lee made her think maybe she'd been going about things all wrong. Rushing randomly from one star system to the next for the past year had been enjoyable enough but hadn't brought her any closer to the Doctor. And careening through the stacks of books hadn't brought her to the book that made the world make sense, unless that book happened to be Hemingway's _Men Without Women_. Well, and perhaps it was – no way to know but to give it a try. And if reading got tiresome it might do her some good just to stand in one place and think.

_Men Without Women_, she discovered after a few pages, was not the book she'd been looking for. Still, there was something very pleasant about sitting in a comfortable chair with a book on her lap, especially when Lee was sitting in the other chair angled towards her. He read intently and did not like to talk much, but whenever she asked him for something he did his best to answer, and as he got to know her better his words came out more easily. He showed her how to get more accurate search results from typing into the computer, following a certain fixed protocol, rather than bantering about with the Courtesy Nodes. Jenny's tendency was to get into a car and go for a ride as soon as the computer suggested a volume, but Lee was more patient, spent more time doing multiple searches to see what would overlap, what words – TARDIS, Gallifrey, Dalek – came up over and over, and were more traceable than _doctor_, _time_, _genocide_.

In the end they did find a history of the Time War. There didn't happen to be any comfortable armchairs in that part of the Library, but that was probably for the best. Jenny sat at a long wooden table with separators between all the seats, so that Lee could sit in the chair next to her and hold her hand but couldn't see the words on the page. He didn't lean over to try to look, didn't make her tell him why she was crying, just stayed there with her and waited, and held her when she was done.

*

_The volumes on war cover roughly eighty-nine centuries of past human and alien history and occupy 486,211 square kilometres in the northern part of the Western Hemisphere, most easily reached from the North Pole Landing Station._

_Volumes on the Time War occupy only one shelf._

_The vast majority of books in the war section were written by human beings and chronicle wars between human beings. This pattern holds true for the library as a whole. Other races have their own stories and histories, their own technologies of information, their own libraries – none of which take up anywhere near the physical space, the processed forest, of this one. I know this because humans have also written histories of alien races, including alien libraries, and the histories have been saved to the hard drive._

_Books on the wars of future centuries, like all books which have fallen back through the cracks of time and made their way in to the collection, are kept in a special Restricted Section near the Core and will only become available after their publication, so that library patrons and warlords may avoid spoilers._

*

There were reading carrels and there were sleeping carrels. Nothing luxurious, but they were good clean beds, meant to provide good clean nights of sleep between days of research and reading. Jenny was grateful to have this rather than, say, the floor of a dirty prison cell. Still, some privacy would have been nice, particularly now as she was spending more and more time with Lee. The time she wasn't with Lee, she was lying in a good clean bed wishing no one else were around to disturb her unclean thoughts.

He didn't seem much for torrid affairs, so there was little chance he'd succumb to her charms within the next four days, which were all she planned to stay on this planet. On the other hand, he didn't seem much for flying around in spaceships, which ruled out the possibility of a long, slow romance. He had an old-fashioned dream of a lovely house and a lovely wife, and fly-fishing trips with his beautiful children, things that had nothing to do with Jenny's dreams of travelling the universe, saving planets, and finding her father. And Jenny wasn't giving up on her dreams, no matter how kind a man might be or how charming his crooked smile.

Meanwhile here he was, charming her, and the tension was getting nigh on unbearable. At first Jenny had liked that there were so many other people using the library but now she rather wished they'd go away, so that she and Lee could have more time alone together.

And then one afternoon, as she was following him into a deeper and darker section of the stacks and wishing there weren't a librarian following behind them, they heard a clatter like a bunch of sticks falling on the wooden floor, and when Jenny turned around the librarian was gone.

"Hello!" she called out. "You don't need to hide, it's all right. If you don't approve of my being here I'll just –"

But there was no one there, no one at all, and no way they could have got away without Jenny hearing. There was nothing, not even an echo, but Jenny found herself shaking the same way she had when she was talking to Robin's ghost. Never mind that she'd been wishing giant slime-spitting frogs on the librarian a few moments ago. They would have left behind a body to be buried – or at least the bones.

The bones, and an empty suit. That was all they found when they went back. Jenny was just confused, but she saw the look of recognition and horror on Lee's face before he grabbed her hand and started running. They had a long way to go but he knew his way. He didn't stop until they were standing in the middle of bright skylit room with a computer console.

"You know what this is?" Jenny asked.

He nodded, but he was winded from running the terror wasn't helping him trying to get the words out.

"Write it down," Jenny said. "No, type it into the catalogue. Two birds with one stone, like. See if it brings us any information we can use."

*

_A search of the files returns only four references to the Vashta Nerada:_

_The Primeval Forest: The Origins of Humanity's Fears, by Stanislaw Nowak._

_Clear Cut: The Hidden Consequences of Large Scale Deforestation, by Wilhelmina Quann,_

_A Treasury of Folklore across the Galaxies, edited by Eileen McAvoy._

_Collected Oral Testimonies of the Survivors of the Library, compiled by Strackman Lux. (Restricted Section, to be released after its publication, two years from now.)_

_I also direct Jenny to several sources that were never published in book form and so were not reprinted as part of the construction of the Library. The information floats in the universe like so much dust, with no confirmation, no paper or editorial stamp on which to rest._

_The Vashta Nerada hatch in sixty-seven-year cycles, and following their hatching are so numerous they fill every shadow. They exist everywhere, the floating words tell her, and cannot be defeated. The only hope of survival is to run._

*

An unattributed, undated quote at the bottom of the page caught Jenny's eye and for some reason she thought she could hear it spoken aloud in her mind, the man's voice familiar as the childhood she never had. "Daleks, aim for the eyestalk. Sontarans, back of the neck. Vashta Nerada, run. Just run."

"All right then, we've done that, but where are we supposed to run to? I need to see the person in charge."

In the calm, proper face and voice of the librarian whose bones they'd picked up a few minutes ago, the computer offered to take them to the section on political biographies.

"No, not the books, the _person_. What does this planet have, a governor? A president? A commander?"

The screen showed her a map highlighting two rooms and a twisting line between them, and the courtesy node said, "The head librarian's office is thirty-three point two kilometres from your current location."

"Right, good enough. Take me to your leader already. Oh, and sound the alarm. Evacuate immediately."

*

_Emergency procedures include localized elimination of oxygen (to stop fires without risking water damage); shutting down escape routes to prevent the theft of data or physical copies; shutting down entrance routes to prevent hostile alien invasion. Librarians are authorized to use force to prevent unauthorized persons from accessing the Restricted Section. Chemicals are on hand for the extermination of insects, arachnids and rodents. There is no emergency procedure prepared to prevent swarms of darkness._

*

With all the alarm bells sounding and the red lights flashing it was harder for them to make sense of where they were, but the computer knew where to take them.

"My grandmother said," Lee whispered as they sat huddled together by the car window, under the electric light, "don't let anybody tell you they're just stories. Don't go into the dark wood. There really are monsters, and they're waiting for you there."

"But we're not in the wood. This shouldn't be happening," said Jenny, and even though they were moving as fast as the car could take them, her legs twitched from sitting still.

*

_Even I'm not allowed to read the spoilers. They're kept in a separate division of the hard drive, blocked by firewalls. Daddy says I can read them when I'm older. I wish I knew what to do. I want them to be all right. I want to know that they'll be all right._

*

"Excuse me, do you have an appointment?"

"We have an emergency," said Jenny, already striding past the assistant and pushing into the head librarian's office. "We need to get these people out of here," she said to the woman sitting behind the desk inside. "There's…there's something in the shadows. The Vashta Nerada." She hadn't said the name out loud before and it made her shiver. It had no such effect on the librarian.

"Don't talk nonsense, please. This is a research facility, not an adventure camp in the wild woods. No one's ever died in the Library."

"One of your people just did," said Jenny, and Lee held up the dead librarian's uniform wrapped around the bones. The head librarian's eyes narrowed.

"You need to get people out and there's no time to arrange for a transport vehicle." Jenny insisted. "You've got teleportation devices, haven't you?"

"Only short-range. But all of this is irrelevant."

"Will you stop arguing with me and help us get these people out of here?" Jenny shouted, then quietly added, "Please?"

But the librarian was only interested in getting these strangers out of her office. Luckily she was no match for Jenny in a fight.

While they scuffled, Lee was quietly and furiously typing into the librarian's computer.

"Please record your message, to be communicated to all librarians and library patrons," the computer requested.

Jenny put her adversary in a headlock and spoke into the computer. "There's something attacking every living thing in this library. We've got to get out of here. My ship is small but I'll take all I can. Meet me at the North Pole Landing Station."

"Count the shadows," Lee said quietly.

"That's right," Jenny said. "For God's sake, remember, if you want to live, count the shadows."

"But what shall _I_ do?" asked the computer, switching to a voice that sounded unbearably young – younger and more frightened than Jenny herself. A little girl's face appeared at the head of the courtesy node.

"The librarians won't help us, it seems," said Jenny, still holding on to hers. "It's up to you now. Please, you have to save us."

"How?" the little girl asked.

*

_Holding on to the text of the books is easy. There are only so many combinations of letters and punctuation available and the hard drive has room for them all. The first living mind to be saved is a shock to my system. It (he) won't stay still, wants to grow and change and move around._

_They mustn't know they're in the Library or they'll want to go exploring. They must be made to believe they're somewhere much less interesting. They need to be kept in their assigned files._

_I need more power. I need more space._

*

Jenny let go of the librarian and ran. She was never sure how much of her message got out to the rest of the Library, or how many people were there to listen by the time it did. While they were running they heard another message, presumably from the head librarian herself, but it was cut off in mid-sentence. The shadows were growing faster than the people or the cars could move, and the computer saved rather than taking chances. The only one to reach the departure gate with her was Lee, and once they were there he told her he wasn't leaving.

"Are you mad?"

He shook his head. "You go and get help, I trust you. L-let me stay here with the books."

"You won't _be_ with the books if they get you first. You won't _be_ anywhere at all. You'll be –"

"In the computer," he finished for her, and it took Jenny some moments to get over her surprise – he'd never interrupted her before.

"You don't want to come with me," she said at last. "But what if we can't bring you back? What if you end up as just a...just a ghost, a string of numbers..."

She was babbling, she knew, but he wouldn't hold it against her. He'd turned away and was typing something into the computer, she couldn't tell what. Then he looked her in the eyes, said, "You're a traveller, I'm not," and kissed her gently on the lips, and then he pressed one more key.

The next thing Jenny knew she was at the controls of her own ship, which was asking her for a destination. "I still don't know how to find the Doctor," she said aloud. "But find me Strackman Lux. We'll make our way back from there."

*

_4022 have been saved. There is a trace file of one survivor, but this record was destroyed by the last command to be entered into the computer before the silence._

_4022 saved, no survivors. We wait._


End file.
